Asian studies personal statement example

Personal statement example

The postcard showed Victoria Harbour in what looked like the early 1960s, and on the back someone had written four lines in Chinese, then given up and finished in English: "Weather hot. Ship leaves Thursday. Tell Mum." I found it during a week's volunteering at my local museum, where a volunteer coordinator had asked a small group of us to sort a donated box of postcards by place and approximate date. My job was simple: wear gloves, record what was printed on each card, photograph both sides and flag anything for the staff to check. I could not read the Chinese lines properly, so I flagged it, and a curator later explained that the card had probably been sent by a merchant seaman. That small switch between two languages has stayed with me because it showed how ordinary people lived across places that textbooks usually treat separately.

I want to study Asia because I keep running into questions that my current subjects can only partly answer. In A level History I have studied British imperial history, but almost always from London outwards. For my Extended Project I tried to reverse that a little by comparing how three British newspapers reported the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Using the local library's digital newspaper archive, I noticed that coverage focused heavily on Chris Patten, the royal yacht and the rain at the ceremony, while the voices of Hong Kong residents appeared mostly in short quotations near the end of articles. I could only conclude so much without reading Chinese-language sources, and that limitation is one reason I want a degree that combines language study with history and culture.

To begin addressing that gap, I have attended a weekly Mandarin evening class at a local college for just over a year. I can now hold basic conversations, read simple passages and write around three hundred characters from memory. I practise tones by recording myself and comparing the recordings with my teacher's, which is humbling but useful. I know Cantonese is more widely spoken in Hong Kong, and I would like to understand why Mandarin and Cantonese occupy such different positions in different places.

My reading has widened my sense of the region beyond Hong Kong. Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China helped me see the Qing collapse and the Republican period as more than a prelude to 1949. Rana Mitter's book on China's war with Japan between 1937 and 1945 made me realise how little I had been taught about that conflict, and it led me to read more about Japan's empire in Korea and Taiwan. My Geography course has added another angle: a coursework investigation into how a local high street has changed over time made me curious about how cities such as Shenzhen grew so rapidly, and how planning decisions affect who can afford to live there.

Outside school, I work Saturday shifts at a café, where I have learned to stay calm during a lunchtime rush and to train new staff on the till. On weekday mornings I walk my younger brother to primary school because my mum starts work early, so I have become good at planning my time around other people. I also play badminton for a club in the next town. It is not academic, but it has introduced me to teammates from Malaysian and Chinese families, and conversations after practice have taught me more about everyday life than any single book.

At university I would like to build my language skills properly, study the history of the region from more than one direction, and eventually be able to read a card like that one from Victoria Harbour without needing to flag it for someone else.